MALLORY, Sir Thomas (c.1416-71), of Newbold Revel, Warws. and Winwick, Northants.

Mallory’s career is unique among fifteenth-century MPs in two respects. First, he was the author of a work of lasting literary significance, Le Morte d’Arthur, a vernacular compilation of Arthurian tales largely drawn from French romances. For conclusive arguments in favour of his authorship: Field, 1-35. Second, in an age when long incarceration was rarely used as a punishment, he suffered a term of imprisonment, albeit not a continuous one, that covered a significant part of his adult life. No other fifteenth-century English knight is known to have spent as long in an English prison as he did; and it is a striking curiosity that, unlike so many others, he was unable to free himself either by acquittal or the pleading of a pardon. This surprising failure has informed attempts to explain his imprisonment in terms of the conflict between York and Lancaster. On this argument he was detained as a dangerous adherent of one or other of these contending parties. Ibid. 128. Yet there are obvious difficulties with such an argument: his imprisonment began when the rival factions of York and Lancaster were only just beginning to form; his long detention in the 1450s spanned periods of both Yorkist and Lancastrian control of central government; and there is nothing either in his career or Le Morte d’Arthur to identify him unequivocally as a committed supporter of either side. Analysis of the author’s departures from his sources in the compilation of Le Morte has failed to identify his political sympathies: Field, Malory: Texts and Sources (Arthurian Studies, xl), 47-71. Others, such as Thomas Tresham*, who suffered extended imprisonment for political reasons, were very obvious partisans: Mallory, on all the available evidence, was not.

Only slightly more persuasive is the notion that Mallory’s sustained imprisonment was the function of the personal animosity of Humphrey Stafford, duke of Buckingham (d.1460). The duke was certainly responsible for his initial arrest and detention, but it is questionable whether even so powerful a lord could adapt the processes of common law so as to ensure such a long-term incarceration. Although the system of indictment was undoubtedly open to considerable manipulation, royal justices, if they did allow themselves to adapt mesne process according to external non-legal dictates, did so only reluctantly and conditionally. In any event, whatever the part played by the duke in Mallory’s incarceration in the 1450s, he can have had no part in his renewed detention in the 1460s. Less open to objection is the idea that Mallory was detained as a common criminal, one whose crimes crossed the boundary that divided base and incoherent criminality from the illegal, but socially acceptable, acts routinely committed by men of his rank in the pursuit of coherent ends. C. Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 622. One might further surmise that the alleged offence that began his troubles – the supposed assault on the duke of Buckingham in January 1450 – was a genuine attempt at assassination, and thus contravened the social norms that restrained the level of violence employed in personal quarrels. None the less, even here there are difficulties. If that offence was so serious, it is odd that he should have escaped indictment for it for more than 18 months. Moreover, even if he was guilty of many of the charges laid against him, his long imprisonment is still anomalous. Whatever a man of rank was charged with, short of treason, was routinely purged by fine or pardon. Indeed, although his imprisonment was preceded by indictment for a long list of offences including rape, other men of his rank faced similar indictments without the same punishment. Even in the unlikely event that he was guilty of all that was laid at his door, his catalogue of recorded crime was modest compared with that of such of his contemporaries as Sir Henry Bodrugan†, Richard Tregoose*, Gilbert Debenham I*, William Tailboys* and Thomas Mulsho of Geddington (Northamptonshire), none of whom suffered at the hands of the law as he did. Mulsho provides a particularly direct comparison. At a view of frankpledge held at Geddington on 30 Sept. 1440 he was indicted for a far more extensive catalogue of crimes (including several rapes and the attempted murder of the local vicar), than were laid against Mallory at the beginning of his imprisonment in 1451, yet Mulsho secured and pleaded a pardon within a few months of indictment: KB27/738, rex rot. 27; CPR, 1436-41, p. 511.

Mallory’s renewed imprisonment in the late 1460s, after a few years of freedom, and, in particular, his exemption from the pardons of 1468 and 1470, adds to the sense of puzzlement. Again, a political explanation has been sought, namely that he was involved in the Lancastrian conspiracy of 1468. Field, Sir Thomas Malory, 139-43. This does not convince, yet, in the absence of a criminal indictment to explain his second arrest, no other explanation presents itself. One thing, however, is clear. Exemptions from general pardons were not frivolous. Some serious matter lay behind Mallory’s exclusion; unfortunately, the nature of that matter is simply another mystery in his mysterious career.

Mallory’s family background was distinguished rather than exalted. The Mallorys of Newbold Revel, a junior branch of a family anciently settled at Kirkby Mallory in Leicestershire and Tachbrook Mallory in Warwickshire, first established themselves at Swinford in Leicestershire and Winwick in Northamptonshire in the thirteenth century. As a result of the marriage, in about 1332, of Sir Stephen Mallory to Margaret, one of the three daughters of Sir John Revel† of Newbold Revel, the manor of Newbold Revel descended to their son, Sir John Mallory, in 1383. Ibid. 41; Add. Ch. 21753. By the time of our MP his family was thus both well established and prosperous, with three manors in three counties. His father had made the most of these advantages, sitting in Parliament on at least five occasions, serving as sheriff twice and holding a place on the Warwickshire bench for the last 12 years of his life. Yet the Mallorys did not number among the richest shire gentry. None of their three manors were particularly valuable, and, significantly, for all his activity John Mallory did not maintain the family tradition of knighthood. By the time Thomas inherited the family estate in the late 1430s, John was head of a family of the second rank of gentry, wealthy enough to be distrained to take up, but insufficient to support, a rank that was becoming more socially exclusive. This is an important point for the understanding of Thomas’s career, for his knighthood, taken up early in his career seemingly in relation to military service in Gascony, gives an exaggerated impression of his wealth and standing. The assessment of his mother at an income of as much as £60 p.a. in the subsidy returns of 1436 is curious, for this seems be more than the value of the entire Mallory estate: E179/192/59; Field, Sir Thomas Malory, 89-90.

Mallory’s career can be divided into two distinct parts. Through the 1440s it was typical of the initial stages of those of men of his rank; from the early 1450s it departs into its unique course. Our knowledge of that career has been greatly advanced by Professor Field, who, in an important revision of the traditional account, has shown that he was born later than has generally been supposed, and is thus not to be identified with the namesake who, in 1415, undertook to serve at Calais in the retinue of Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick. Field, Sir Thomas Malory, 55-56. The error is repeated in The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 673. He argues for a date of birth in about that year, and this is consistent with the date – November 1437 – of his first appearance in the records. This first reference is important for it relates to Mallory’s rivalry with his monastic neighbour, Richard Atherstone, abbot of the Cistercian house at Combe, only a few miles from Newbold Revel, a rivalry that was to be so damaging to him later in his career. The point at issue between Mallory and the abbot is unknown, but it may relate to a loan made by the abbot to our MP’s father. In 1436 the abbot sued Mallory’s mother, as John Mallory’s executrix, for £22 6s.: CP40/703, rot. 270d; 705, rot. 433. In an action of trespass brought in the court of common pleas, Abbot Richard claimed damages of £40, alleging that, on 11 Nov. 1437, Mallory, in company with his widowed mother, Philippa, Simon Kynnesman† of Loddington (Northamptonshire) and others, had taken three of the abbot’s oxen from the abbey’s manor at Smite, near Newbold Revel, releasing them only when the abbot paid them 40s. In Michaelmas term 1438 the defendants replied that they were merely taking a distraint as servants of the collectors of the fifteenth and tenth. There is circumstantial evidence to suggest the truth of this plea. The fourth quarter of the tax voted in the 1435 Parliament had fallen due on the date of the alleged offence; and, a few years earlier, the abbot had been sued in Chancery for refusing to allow a fifteenth to be levied upon his tenants at nearby Brinklow. None the less, a jury in the following February found for the abbot, awarding him a modest 20s. in damages. CP40/711, rot. 466. Mallory is styled ‘gentleman’ in this plea. For earlier complaints against the abbot in respect of Brinklow: C1/11/548; 12/198. This episode, insignificant in itself, takes on a greater importance in view of the later relations between our MP and the abbey.

The young Mallory next appears in the records in May 1439 when he witnessed a charter on behalf of his maternal first cousin, Sir Philip Chetwynd of Grendon (Warwickshire). CCR, 1435-41, p. 268. Chetwynd may have acted as an early patron. That knight played a leading part in the Gascon campaigns of 1439 and 1442, and there are two reasons for supposing that Mallory served with him. First, it was during this period that he was knighted: still an esquire in Trinity term 1440, he was a knight by 8 Oct. 1441. Second, in a passage in Le Morte d’Arthur, he shows a familiarity with the names of the lordships of Gascony. CP40/718, rot. 385; E326/10717; Field, Sir Thomas Malory, 86-87. It is thus a fair speculation that he was in Chetwynd’s retinue for the expedition, commanded by John Holand, earl of Huntingdon, which arrived at Bordeaux on 2 Aug. 1439. On the other hand, there is no reference to Mallory in the Gascon rolls from Sept. 1437 to Aug. 1443: C61/128-32. If so, however, his military career was brief. In the early 1440s, by which time his mother was probably dead and the family’s lands united in his hands, he set about establishing himself in local affairs. Philippa does not appear in the records after Feb. 1439: CP40/711, rot. 466d. On 28 Dec. 1441 he headed the attestors to the Northamptonshire parliamentary election, marking what, in normal circumstances, would have been the start of a career in county administration. C219/15/2.

As it transpired, this was not to be – largely, it seems, because of Mallory’s propensity for criminal behaviour. Yet in his first sustained dispute, he appears to have been more victim than perpetrator. On 6 Nov. 1441 two minor Northamptonshire gentry, Thomas Tewe and John Horne, allegedly broke his close at Winwick. Tewe was a disruptive figure. He was dep. of John Badley, keeper of the King’s gaol at Northampton castle: C145/313/12/4. Interestingly, like Mallory, both he and John Horne he were attestors to the parlty. election of 28 Dec. 1441: C219/15/2. They were tenants of the duchy of Lancaster manor of Daventry, and ready, it appears, to take advantage of that status to protect themselves from the consequences of a series of lawless actions. Mallory was certainly not their only victim. On 1 Oct. 1443 another Horne, William, was indicted at Northampton before the county j.p.s not only for illegally entering our MP’s free warren at Winwick a few days before, but also for assaulting Robert Catesby, uncle of one of the county’s leading gentry, William Catesby*, at Daventry, and for a series of offences against lesser men. KB27/751, rex rot. 4; 753, rex rot. 2; KB9/260/10. Understandably, Mallory and the Catesbys then acted to protect themselves. On 16 Aug. 1444 Mallory allegedly assaulted Tewe at Daventry, and it was presumably for this offence and other undocumented ones that, in the following Hilary term, he and others were sued by the Crown for assaulting and wounding royal servants. KB27/740, rot. 78; CP40/736, rot. 457d.

These pending charges may explain why Mallory sought a seat in the Parliament that met on 25 Feb. 1445. He was wise to have done so, for during the long Parliament that followed there was an intensification of the legal, if not the physical, conflict between the two sides. In Easter term 1445 Tewe sued an appeal of mayhem against Mallory, William Catesby and others. Mallory replied, on 16 June (11 days after the second prorogation of Parliament), by bringing a bill in King’s bench against Tewe and John Horne, then detained in the Marshalsea as the charges against them mounted. Soon afterwards, however, the MP, for the first but not the last time, also found himself detained there. Although, on 19 Feb. 1446, while Parliament was still in session, he secured a writ of supersedeas against Tewe’s appeal of mayhem, by 8 May, a month after the end of Parliament, he was a prisoner, perhaps to find surety of the peace to Tewe. On that day Tewe brought a bill against him claiming damages of £200 for the alleged assault of August 1444. KB27/737, rot. 20; 738, rot. 14; 740, rot. 78.

This matter never came to trial, because the dispute was seemingly brought to an end by arbitration. On the following 9 Nov. 1446 Mallory entered into a bond in 500 marks to the King to abide the award of the duchy of Lancaster council on all matters pending between him and Tewe. Ex. inf. James Ross from unsorted TNA material. In all this, as far as the story is adequately reflected in the legal records, Mallory was not the aggressor. Both Tewe and the Hornes appear to have been men of unsavory reputation with a series of charges, including murder, laid against them, and our MP was not alone in opposing them. It would, in short, be wrong to interpret this episode as a foretaste of what was to come later in Mallory’s troubled career, although it might speculatively be suggested that it gave him, or strengthened within him, an inclination to take the law into his own hands. He might have felt, seemingly with some justification, that he was the wronged party, but that his socially-inferior opponent, exploiting the status of a royal tenant, was able to get the better of him.

Such speculation aside, the Mallory of the 1440s was a man of promise, his troubles with Tewe notwithstanding, laying the foundations of what should have been a successful career. The principal building block of that foundation was the close relationship he established with the young Henry Beauchamp, duke of Warwick. It is not known when this relationship began, but by the time of the duke’s premature death on 11 June 1446, Mallory numbered among his principal retainers, in receipt of a generous annuity of 20 marks. On 23 Jan. 1447 he headed the jury in the duke’s inquisition post mortem, and on the following 4 Mar. he was commissioned, with others connected with the late duke, to inquire into the Beauchamp lands in Staffordshire. E368/220, rot. 121; CIPM, xxvi. 592; C139/123/43. This place in Duke Henry’s service explains his election to represent Warwickshire in the 1445 Parliament. It was probably also as a retainer of Duke Henry that Mallory was involved in offences against Katherine, wife of Sir William Peyto‡, then a prisoner in France. In the summer of 1445 the property Katherine held in Gloucestershire as dower from her first husband, Thomas Stafford†, was raided by a gang of 300 men, headed by Thomas Burdet* and others connected with the Beauchamps; at the same time Mallory came to another of her dower properties at Sibbertoft, a few miles from Winwick, and took four ‘retherbestes’ from her bailiff there. C1/15/77-78; A.C. Baugh, ‘Documenting Sir Thomas Malory’, Speculum, viii. 19-20; Carpenter, 416. Field has attempted to redate this offence to c.1453: Field, Sir Thomas Malory, 91-93. It is, however, quite clear that the attack on Katherine’s Glos. property took place in 1445, shortly before her husband’s release from French custody, and that the petition relating to this offence is of the same date as that complaining of Mallory’s offence. Both petitions are in the same hand and both begin ‘ful gracious and ful reuerend lord’. No doubt the two offences were connected, but it is difficult to place them into any sensible context. Since Peyto was also a Beauchamp retainer, it does not represent, in any obvious fashion, a dispute between rival affinities. Significantly, perhaps, the property targeted was not Peyto’s own but one his wife held in dower. The heir to these properties was John Stanley II*, then at the beginning of his long and prominent career, and it may be that his claims were a factor. Indeed, it is possible that the offenders believed themselves to be acting in the interest of the imprisoned Sir William, aiming, through a show of force, to deter his wife from prematurely alienating her interest to Stanley. In a pardon of 1446 Stanley is described as ‘tenant of Sibbertoft’: C67/39, m. 23. If this is the case, it might be further speculated that the attacks were a function of tension between the duke of Warwick and the duke of Buckingham, of whom Stanley was an important servant.

The death of Duke Henry, leaving an infant daughter as his sole heiress, was the first stage in a major change in the face of Warwickshire politics. This transformation was completed with the daughter’s death in June 1449 and the consequent succession of a northern baron, Richard Neville, to the earldom of Warwick (in right of his wife, Anne, the late Beauchamp duke’s only sister of the whole blood). It is tempting to believe that this profound change had something to do with the dramatic alteration in Mallory’s fortunes. Yet there is no obvious causal link between these two changes. As far as the available evidence goes, Mallory brought ruin upon himself. His early crimes were minor offences typical of men of his class, but this changed in the first month of 1450. On 4 Jan. he and others lay in ambush in the woods of Combe abbey, a few miles from Newbold, with the alleged intention of murdering the duke of Buckingham. KB9/265/78. What might have prompted so unwise an action is unknown: it is unlikely to have been an echo of the tensions between the late Duke Henry and Buckingham, nor is there anything to connect it with the nascent rivalry, not yet serious, between Buckingham and the Neville earl of Warwick. The most likely surmise is that it was an escalation of Mallory’s existing quarrel with the abbey of Combe. C. Carpenter, ‘Sir Thomas Malory’, Bull. IHR, liii. 37.

Whatever the motive for his action, it had severe consequences. Initially, however, legal retribution was slow to come. The first sign that things had begun to go seriously wrong for him dates from nearly 18 months later, when, on 13 July 1451, a commission was issued to Buckingham and the earl of Warwick for his arrest. But even here the alleged offence against the duke was not cited as justification for this arrest, rather he was to be detained to find surety of the peace to the priory of Axholme (Lincolnshire), the mother house of his neighbour, the alien priory at Monks Kirby, and to appear before the King and council to answer certain unspecified charges. CPR, 1446-52, p. 476. Field has been misled by a misreading by Baugh into supposing that a writ had also been issued for his arrest three months earlier, on 15 Mar.: Field, Sir Thomas Malory, 99; Baugh, 6-7. Given the catalogue of offences that was to be laid at his door at a session of the peace some six weeks later, most of which predate this commission and none of which concern, directly at least, Axholme priory, these are rather surprising grounds for his detention. Nor is it easy to explain why, if it was the priory’s interests that were principally being served here, Buckingham should have moved so energetically to arrest our MP. Indeed, unlike the indictment, his determination to bring about that arrest gives colour to the fact of the earlier assault. An account for Michaelmas 1450-1 records a payment of 12d. to one of the duke’s minor servants John Page, ‘conducto ad promuniendum lx valectos domini ad equitandum in comitiva … Receptoris ad obviandum cum domino apud Athereston versus Thomam Mallery militis’. Antiquaries Jnl. xlix. 132.

It has been suggested that there was a political as well as a personal motive here, namely that Buckingham feared Warwick’s intervention on Mallory’s behalf; yet there is, at this date at least, not a single piece of evidence to connect Mallory with the earl. Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 453; Field, Sir Thomas Malory, 103-4. In any event, the arrest was made by the duke on 25 July, and Mallory was committed to the custody of the sheriff, Sir William Mountfort*, who had been his fellow Warwickshire MP in 1445. Confined in the sheriff’s house at Coleshill, Mallory escaped on the night of 27 July and immediately and foolishly resumed his campaign against the abbot of Combe. On the following night he broke into the abbey and plundered goods, and on 29 July he led a larger raid on the abbey’s property. KB9/265/78; Field, Sir Thomas Malory, 101.

Indictment now followed, and again Buckingham took a personal interest in bringing about Mallory’s discomfiture. On 23 Aug. 1451 the duke took the trouble to sit personally as a Warwickshire j.p. to hear a string of charges laid against him. On the following 5 Oct. these indictments were called into the court of King’s bench. KB9/265/77. Two of these indictments – those for the ‘rape’ on two separate occasions of Joan, wife of Hugh Smyth of Monk’s Kirby – have attracted particular attention for the unfavourable light they appear to throw on Mallory’s character. Recently, however, it has been convincingly argued that the offences were abduction with the supposed victim’s consent, and that Mallory ‘had simply assisted [Joan] to leave her husband’: Carpenter, ‘Sir Thomas Malory’, 37-38n.; H.A. Kelly, ‘Statutes of Rapes’, Viator, xxviii. 412-14, 418-19. In normal circumstances the issue of such a writ presaged the pleading of a pardon by the accused. Yet here, for reasons that can only be the subject for speculation, Mallory was not allowed to escape the consequences of his actions, real or alleged, in the usual way. On the contrary, in the months that followed the sending of the indictment into King’s bench, his situation worsened markedly. Soon after the indictment he was either rearrested or surrendered himself to prison. On 24 Nov., five days before the end of Michaelmas term, the chancellor committed him to the warden of the Fleet, who, under the relatively modest penalty of £200, was to keep him until he had found sufficient surety of the peace towards Abbot Atherstone of Combe, Henry Middleton, prior of Axholme, and two lesser men (but, interestingly, not the duke of Buckingham). Mallory must then have had high hopes of a swift release, but such hopes were quickly dashed. Two months later, on 22 Jan. 1452, he was transferred from the relative comfort of the Fleet to the harsher conditions of the Newgate, where the sheriffs of London were to ensure his continued detention on the massive penalty of £4,000. KB145/6/30. Clearly something significant had changed in the space of these two months, but the records are silent as to what it was. Mallory now ceased to be treated as an ordinary gentry criminal. A few days later he made the first of a series of appearances in King’s bench, led there by his gaolers, the London sheriffs. Without a pardon to plead he had only the option of awaiting a jury trial. Given the difficulty of bringing county juries to Westminster the wait might be a long one, unless the justices were prepared, as they routinely were in such cases, to have the case heard locally by nisi prius. This was not done, nor was Mallory released on the surety of wealthy mainpernors as men of his rank almost always were in such situations. In his case, most unusually, he remained in the uncomfortable custody of the sheriffs of London. KB27/763, rex rot. 3d. The treatment of his kinsmen, Richard Mallory of Radcliffe-on-the-Wreake (Leics.), esquire, and another of his confederates, Geoffrey Walshale of Brinklow, both of whom were indicted for the attacks on the abbey of Combe, provides an interesting contrast. Both sued out pardons on 7 Apr. 1452 and successfully pleaded them in the following Easter term: KB27/763, rex rot. 8d; 764, rex rot. 4d.

What followed suggests an effort on Buckingham’s part to provide another reason for Mallory’s detention. On 31 Jan. the duke joined with John Mowbray, duke of Norfolk, in bringing a bill against the prisoner. Asking for the wholly disproportionate damages of £500, the two dukes claimed that, on the previous 20 July 1451, a week after the issue of the commission of arrest, Mallory had illegally hunted in their park at Caludon near Coventry. The park belonged to Mowbray, and Buckingham’s interest in the matter was perhaps that of a feoffee for the protection of the jointure interest of Mowbray’s wife, Eleanor, the duke’s half-sister. KB27/763, rot. 23d; Baugh, 21. However this may be, on the following 20 May Mallory agreed, on the modest penalty of 200 marks, to abide the arbitration of Eleanor’s brother, Thomas Bourgchier, bishop of Ely, in his dispute with Mowbray, with the award to be made by the following Christmas. KB146/6/30/3; KB27/764, rot. 52 (ii)d; Field, Sir Thomas Malory, 108.

This agreement suggests a willingness to compromise that contrasts markedly with what had gone before. It was probably also the explanation for an improvement in Mallory’s terms of imprisonment: he was returned to the Marshalsea. This proved a prelude to his temporary release, still untried on the indictments against him, on the following 21 Oct. The identity of sureties for that release has been taken to imply that he had reached some accommodation even with the duke of Buckingham. One of the sureties, Sir John Baskerville of Eardisley (Herefordshire), numbered among Buckingham’s retainers, and John Leventhorpe II* was the duke of Norfolk’s deputy as marshal of the Marshalsea. KB145/6/30; KB27/766, rex rot. 45d; Field, Sir Thomas Malory, 108-9; Carpenter, ‘Sir Thomas Malory’, 38. Yet, even assuming the two dukes sanctioned his release that was no reason for their servants to stand as his sureties. This, in turn, suggests a much more involved explanation for the events of 1452. The justices of King’s bench may themselves have sponsored the arbitration, and they later, perhaps because they found the result of that arbitration satisfactory, showed themselves ready to allow Mallory to win his permanent freedom by paying a fine. Perhaps that was already their inclination in Michaelmas term 1452, but they allowed themselves to be dissuaded by the objection of the dukes. In return for this concession they insisted that the dukes found sureties for Mallory’s next appearance in court as an alternative to his admittance to make fine.

It looked as though Mallory had overcome his difficulties. The justices appear to have been sympathetic to his cause, and he might reasonably have hoped to secure a pardon to plead when he next appeared before them. Yet this is not how things worked out. When he submitted himself into King’s bench on the morrow of Purification 1453, at the end of his term on bail, he was not, as was generally the case in such circumstances, recommitted to sureties for a further appearance at a later date, but confined again in the Marshalsea with the marshal under pain of as much as £2,000 to ensure he did not escape. More puzzlingly still, on the following 26 Mar. a commission was addressed to Buckingham, Edward, Lord Grey of Groby, and the sheriff of Warwickshire, Sir William Birmingham, for his arrest and production before the King and council ‘to answer certain charges’. KB27/766, rex rot. 45d; CPR, 1452-61, p. 61. Yet, on the evidence of the King’s bench plea rolls, he was then in the Marshalsea, where he remained into the following year. Since the marshal was never pursued for the penalty of £2,000, there is no reason to suppose he had escaped, and a possible explanation for the commission is bureaucratic inertia. None the less, although the commission was seemingly for the arrest of a man already imprisoned, its issue suggests that Mallory had matters outstanding against him unrelated to the charges he faced in King’s bench and raises the possibility that he had committed new offences during his brief period of freedom.

No more is known of Mallory’s imprisonment until 4 Feb. 1454, when the marshal was bound on pain of £1,000 to keep him securely and not allow him bail without the permission of King’s bench. KB29/84, rot. 18d; Baugh, 10. This in itself was contrary to normal practice as he should have made appearances in the court in the last three terms of 1453 and first of 1454 to give a local jury the opportunity to come to Westminster and try him on the indictments. But it was not until the quindene of Easter that he once more appeared in court, and there then followed the clearest indication that his imprisonment was being determined by other than strictly legal considerations. The sheriff did not return the writ summoning the jury, and the justices, as perhaps they had been inclined to do in 1452, admitted the prisoner to make fine (and so purge the indictments against him) and the jury was exonerated. Mallory was to go sine die. Yet this decision was immediately overturned. The three lines of text recording it in the plea roll together with the corresponding marginal annotation, ‘f[inem] f[ecit]’ and ‘sine die’, have been almost entirely obliterated. A new decision is recorded in the form of a less significant concession to the unfortunate knight. His trial was put out nisi prius to take place at Warwick on 19 Sept., and he was to be released on bail pending a further appearance to hear the judgement one month after Michaelmas following. KB27/763, rex rot. 3d. Again these sureties were Buckingham’s retainer, Baskerville, Leventhorpe and several other servants of the duke of Norfolk, most notably Sir Roger Chamberlain*, and it appears that the justices were following the same compromise as prevailed on Mallory’s previous release.

No doubt had Mallory behaved with circumspection he would soon have won his permanent release. Unfortunately, however, he did not. By the time he was scheduled to appear in King’s bench again, he had been arrested in Essex on suspicion of felony and imprisoned forti et dura in Colchester castle in custody of the castle’s keeper, John Hampton II*. According to indictments taken before the Essex j.p.s, on 9 July 1454 he had joined forces with a yeoman, John Aleyn of London, who had committed a number of felonious horse thefts in the county. The two men had ridden from Waltham Cross (Hertfordshire) to Thaxted (Essex) and thence to Braintree, where they conspired to despoil William, brother of John Green III*, and others of their goods. Then, on 21 July, a gang led by Aleyn and acting on Mallory’s orders, moved to nearby Gosfield and, when ‘omnes christiani eiusdem ville ad ecclesiam fuerunt missam audiendi’, broke the close and houses of John Green but stole nothing because they were interrupted. The Greens, the principal victims of these offences, were important men: John, a lawyer, was closely associated with Buckingham’s half-brother, Henry, Viscount Bourgchier, and was to be Speaker in the 1460 Parliament; and William was soon to be receiver-general of the viscount’s brother, Thomas, the newly appointed archbishop of Canterbury. L.S. Woodger, ‘Hen. Bourgchier’ (Oxf. Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1974), 271-2; F.R.H. Du Boulay, Ldship. Canterbury, 400. Presumably Mallory targeted the Greens because of their association with the Bourgchiers and through them to Buckingham and Norfolk, the husband of Viscount Bourgchier’s sister. Yet why he should have chosen the Greens among all the very many men connected with Buckingham and Norfolk is unknown. The best guess is that John Green, as a lawyer, had played some part in Mallory’s persecution, and Mallory was now seeking revenge.

The whole affair soon rebounded to Mallory’s disadvantage. At Chelmsford on 15 Oct. a powerful group of the county’s j.p.s, headed by Peter Ardern, j.c.b. and including John Green himself, took indictments against Mallory, and by the following day, he had been arrested and committed to the custody of the sheriff, Sir Thomas Cobham, in Colchester gaol. Two weeks later two of his sureties, Leventhorpe and Thomas Ince of Stanford Rivers (Essex), cited this as the explanation for his failure to appear in court and so clear themselves from the penalties due from them and the other sureties for his default. No sooner had they entered this explanation, however, than Mallory was free once more. On 30 Oct., on the same day as a writ was issued to the keeper of the gaol to produce him in King’s bench on the following octave of Martin, he escaped from Colchester gaol. KB9/280/42-44; Baugh, 12, 23-26. A few days later, on 5 Nov., almost certainly before news of the escape had reached Westminster, a powerful commission of gaol delivery was issued for Colchester castle. Strikingly, the commissioners were headed by Buckingham and Viscount Bourgchier, men too important generally to concern themselves with such matters, and included John Green. This suggests that Buckingham considered the attacks on the Greens as a personal affront and was determined to make Mallory suffer for them. C66/479, m. 20d. This fear of the duke’s vengeance may be what prompted Sir Thomas to escape before he could face a gaol delivery commission. Some support for this explanation comes from the fact that he seems to have surrendered himself back into King’s bench. On the octave of Martin he appeared there and was once more committed to the Marshalsea. By so doing he rendered the gaol delivery commission, so obviously weighted against him, a legal irrelevance.

None the less, thereafter Mallory’s situation deteriorated. On 9 Jan. 1455 he was indicted before the Essex j.p.s,, again including John Green, for his escape. Much more significantly, on 19 May he was transferred from the Marshalsea to the Tower of London. KB9/280/84; KB29/85, rot. 5; Baugh, 13. It has been suggested that there was a political motive for this transfer since it took place only three days before the first battle of St. Albans. Such a speculation implies that Mallory was identified as a Yorkist, and it has been argued that he was attached to the service of the earl of Warwick. Carpenter, ‘Sir Thomas Malory’, 40. In the absence of any firm evidence of that attachment, however, a more likely explanation for his removal to the Tower is his propensity to escape. What followed was, save for his detention in the Tower, routine legal process. On 19 June he was again brought into court and recommitted to the Tower to await trial on the Warwickshire indictments (those for Essex had yet to be sent into court). An attempt was made to bring a Warwickshire jury to Westminster, but it failed and several leading gentry of the county, headed by Sir Thomas Erdington* and Sir William Birmingham, were fined for their failure to attend. Baugh, 13; E101/108/12, rot. 99. Writs were also issued to the Essex j.p.s, ordering them to send the indictments they had taken into King’s bench. KB9/280/42. As these efforts to bring him to trial continued, Mallory finally secured what had for so long been denied him. On 24 Nov. 1455 he was allowed to sue out a general pardon for offences committed before the previous 9 July, in other words a pardon sufficient to clear him on the King’s suit in all the indictments against him. Yet his hopes of freedom were to be disappointed. On the following 30 Jan. he was brought into King’s bench by his gaoler, Thomas Gower I*, lieutenant of the constable of the Tower, Henry Holand, duke of Exeter. Armed with his pardon he should have been able to secure his release, and yet he could not. Field claims that the court refused to recognize the pardon or the sureties for the keeping of the peace on which the successful pleading of a pardon depended. C67/41, m. 15; KB27/763, rex rot. 3d; Field, Sir Thomas Malory, 116. Certainly these sureties were not men of particular substance – three gentlemen, headed by his kinsman, Roger Mallory, a saddler and two tailors – and provide a marked contrast in rank to those who had previously offered surety for him. But pardons were generally accepted on the strength of such modest sureties. Further, the record does not say that the pardon was rejected; it says the opposite. The judges awarded that he go sine die and that the jurors summoned to try him be exonerated. In other words, the King’s action against him, arising from the indictments of August 1451, was over. The controlment roll confirms this: a note above his name in the record of the process against those then indicted says that he had a charter of pardon allowed in Hilary term 1456. KB29/83, rot. 25d; Baugh, 8.

None the less, despite the pardon and the consequent termination of the process on the Warwickshire indictment, Mallory was committed to the custody of the marshal to find sufficient surety of the peace to the King and his people. Here there seems to have been a legal sleight of hand: the pardon was allowed on the sureties offered, but then the sureties were deemed not to have discharged the prisoner from his obligation to find surety of the peace. Here again it is tempting to find a political explanation for Mallory’s vicissitudes. His pardon was secured while the duke of York was Protector; it was deemed, although allowable, insufficient to secure his release at a time when the duke’s power was fading (although it was not until 25 Feb. that he resigned as Protector). This, however, is perhaps to posit too close a correlation between political and legal realities. The justices may have failed to release him because, despite their earlier apparent sympathy, they had come to consider him a dangerous criminal after his activities in Essex. He was now, despite his pardon, in an even worse position legally. He need no longer be brought into court regularly pending his trial on indictment, for he was detained pending not a trial but the production of acceptable surety of the peace. The wait proved a long one. In the following Trinity term Mallory was transferred from the Marshalsea to the custody of the sheriff of Middlesex in Newgate, from whence, in January 1457, he was taken into Ludgate, the prison of the sheriffs of London. There he remained until the following 19 Oct., when he was committed to the bail of the earl of Warwick’s uncle, William Neville, Lord Fauconberg, and two men who were presumably Fauconberg’s servants, William Brigham of Brigham (Yorkshire) and John Clerkson of Arundel (Sussex), to surrender again into King’s bench on 28 Dec. Field, Sir Thomas Malory, 118-20; KB29/87, rot. 17. It is tempting to see Fauconberg’s intervention as evidence of Mallory’s connexion with Warwick, but, if it is, it stands almost alone. Moreover, if the earl was closely concerned in his affairs, it is odd that he was not able to win his release in the immediate aftermath of the Yorkist victory at the first battle of St. Albans.

Fauconberg was careful to insure himself against loss should Mallory fail to surrender at the end of the term of bail: on 22 Oct. he and his two probable servants took a bond in £300 from him. KB146/6/36/1. This insurance may have gone further. When Mallory died, his estates were in the hands of eight feoffees, headed by Walter Blount*, Lord Mountjoy. The date of the feoffment is unknown, but, since Blount and another of the feoffees, Walter Wrottesley, are described as ‘esquires’, it must have been made before they were knighted at Towton in March 1461. There were two distinct groups among the feoffees: four of them were personal connexions of our MP, namely two kinsmen of his wife, Thomas and John Walsh, his own kinsman, Robert Mallory, and Thomas Pulton, a London tailor who had previously stood surety for him; the other four, Blount, Wrottesley, Henry Everingham* and Ralph Wolseley* were all associated with the earl of Warwick. KB27/900, rex rot. 5; Field, Sir Thomas Malory, 127-9. Again, however, it would be wrong to take this as further possible evidence of Mallory’s own connexion with that great lord. As in the case of other feoffments with two such distinct groupings, one group was intended to protect the feoffor’s interest, and the other to act in the interest of another who had an interest in the lands. If this was the case here, then the most likely occasion for the feoffment is the surety offered for Mallory in October 1457 by Fauconberg, with Blount and the others given an interest in the Mallory lands as a surety in case he should default. In other words, they were the representatives of Fauconberg not Mallory.

As it transpired, Mallory surrendered back to King’s bench on the due date, and at this point the heat seems temporarily to have gone from the issue of his imprisonment. He even enjoyed a brief and unlawful period of freedom in Warwickshire just after Easter 1459. When, either through arrest or surrender, he was once more detained, the marshal was simply ordered to keep him securely on pain of a modest £100. KB29/87, rot. 17; Field, Sir Thomas Malory, 121. By the following summer, however, a greater value was once more placed on his continued imprisonment. This, at least, is the implication of a statute merchant he entered into before the mayor of the Westminster staple on 15 July 1459: he undertook to pay the heavy sum of 2,000 marks to William Brandon†, marshal of the Marshalsea, and John Wingfield†, both servants of the duke of Norfolk, at the following Michaelmas. There is every reason to suppose that Brandon and Wingfield were seeking security for a penalty placed upon them by the justices should Mallory escape from the Marshalsea. His transfer to Newgate in the following Hilary term suggests continued interest in his secure detention. C241/243/26; KB29/87, rot. 17. What happened next is uncertain. There is no evidence for his imprisonment after Hilary term 1460 and before the spring of 1469, and Field has plausibly suggested that he was released when the Yorkists took London in July 1460. Field, Sir Thomas Malory, 123. That release, if such it were, may indicate that the Yorkists viewed him favourably, but it may simply be that he benefited from the general chaos of that summer. Further, with the death of the duke of Buckingham at the battle of Northampton in the same month, there was no powerful figure with any interest in his continued detention.

In the early 1460s Mallory spent his longest period of freedom since his initial arrest in 1451. On 24 Oct. 1462 he secured a general pardon, and very soon after he was party to a fine by which lands in Winwick were settled on his son Robert and daughter-in-law, Elizabeth Pulteney of Misterton (Leicestershire). C67/45, m. 14; CP25(1)/179/96/3; CP40/806, rot. 62. More significantly, it is possible that he fought in the campaign of the winter of 1462-3 for the reduction of the Lancastrian strongholds in the north. He is named in a contemporary list of participants; unfortunately, however, the list is of very doubtful accuracy, plainly wrong in respect of some of the names listed. Three 15th Cent. Chrons. (Cam. Soc. n.s. xxviii), 157-8; Field, Sir Thomas Malory, 129, 196-202. If he did participate, he was not advanced by his apparent commitment to the new regime. On 12 Sept. 1464 he witnessed the settlement made on the marriage of Ellen Walsh, a probable kinswoman of his wife, to John, son and heir-apparent of William Feldyng*, and it appeared that he was tentatively re-emerging into political society. J. Nichols, Leics., iv. (1), 368-9. Yet, within a few years Mallory once again lost his freedom, for reasons about which one can only speculate. In the general pardon issued by Edward IV on 14 July 1468 he was one of 15 men who were to be excluded from its terms. A month earlier the King had discovered a major Lancastrian plot against him, and several of those excluded from the pardon were implicated in that conspiracy. It is tempting to suppose that Mallory was also involved, but this is unlikely. He was not tried alongside the conspirators; he appears not to have been released from prison during the Readeption, as he certainly would have been had he supported the conspiracy; and if he had been detained as a suspected traitor he would have been committed to the Tower of London rather than Newgate, where he was certainly placed by 20 Apr. 1469, when he witnessed a declaration made by a fellow prisoner. A.F. Sutton, ‘Mallory in Newgate’, The Library, ser. 7, i. 243-8.

Mallory’s detention in Newgate raises the more prosaic possibility that he was imprisoned for debt, perhaps as damages awarded against him for some unrecorded offence, although this hardly explains his exclusion from the pardon. That exclusion, if it does not betoken treason, suggests some serious crime. Instructive here is the identity of another of the excluded, Robert Marshall, who in 1464 had commissioned the murder of his master, John Chaworth, for love of his mistress, Chaworth’s wife. With Marshall, Mallory was one of only six excluded from the general pardon of 22 Feb. 1470. S.J. Payling, ‘Murder, Motive and Punishment’, EHR, cxiii. 11-15; Field, Sir Thomas Malory, 31. Yet, if he had been guilty of a crime as offensive to contemporary mores as that of Marshall, no record of it survives. The reason for his final imprisonment must, like much else in his career, remain a mystery. Nor is it entirely clear when and if that imprisonment was ended by anything other than death.

It was during this last period of detention that Sir Thomas completed the Morte, which was finished in the ninth year of Edward IV, that is between 4 Mar. 1469 and 3 Mar. 1470. His place of burial – the chapel of St. Francis at the Greyfriars near Newgate – proves only that he died in London, but it is highly likely that he died a prisoner. According to a lost contemporary monumental inscription he died on 14 Mar. 1471, but his inquisition post mortem gives a date two days earlier. Sutton, 244; Field, Sir Thomas Malory, 132-3; Collectanea Topographia et Genealogica ed. Nichols, v. 287. At his death Mallory’s estates were still in the hands of the feoffees of the late 1450s. An inquisition taken in respect of his Northamptonshire lands returned that he died seised of no lands, and no writ was issued for an inquiry into his holdings in Warwickshire and Leicestershire. Since his son and heir, Robert, was of age, the Crown had no interest in further inquiry. C140/36/12. Mallory may also have had another son, Thomas, who died in the late 1450s: Field, Sir Thomas Malory, 121. It was presumably the feoffees who made provision for Mallory’s widow, settling the manor of Winwick upon her. Both she and Robert died in 1479 and the family’s lands descended to a minor, Robert’s son Nicholas (b.c.1465). C140/75/46; CPR, 1476-85, p. 183. For the dispute over his wardship: Field, Sir Thomas Malory, 127-8, 134-7. Nicholas restored the family to something like the position it had enjoyed in the time of our MP’s father, serving as both sheriff and j.p. in Warwickshire, but on his death in 1513 the family lands were divided between his two daughters. Field, Sir Thomas Malory, 190-1.

The relatively few facts that can be unearthed about Mallory’s career have been subject to much speculation. Most of what is known of him relates to his long imprisonment. His detention throughout the 1450s militates against a proper understanding of his career, for his active life outside prison was so comparatively brief. What, however, is known of him during the 1440s and 1460s does not mark him out as a figure of political significance, and it is safest to assume that he owed his imprisonment to his criminal propensities. He appears to have behaved with a randomness and unpredictability that alienated potential patrons and left him as persona non grata with successive regimes in the rapidly-changing world of mid fifteenth-century politics.